Dead men and broken hearts

CHAPTER FIVE

I spent the next couple of days getting stuff sorted out. I had taken on two jobs, both of which would need a lot of man hours. And if the Ellis job became a full-blown divorce case, it would involve a lot of paperwork. The problem I had was the Friday bank run. It was a two-man job and Archie always rode shotgun for me. Or at least he sat in the van’s passenger seat with a fifteen-inch police truncheon on his lap. I decided that I would need to take on some extra casual help; someone handy enough with their fists, or a police truncheon, to sit in the van next to Archie and ensure the wages run was completed without incident.

It said a lot about my life up till then that finding someone with those skills would not present much of a problem.

Twinkletoes McBride showed up at my office on the Tuesday morning at eleven a.m. sharp, just as I had asked him to. I told him to take a seat. Twinkletoes was someone you wanted to sit, because when he stood he filled the room and made the furniture look like it belonged in a doll’s house. He certainly had a primeval, backward-evolved sort of presence about him. If Charles Darwin had ever met Twinkle, he probably would have tossed the manuscript of On the Origin of Species into the fire. Twinkle was a big lad — he would have made it to six-foot-six if he hadn’t wanted for a forehead — and he was as bulky as he was tall. Sadly, his physical presence was not, it had to be said, matched by much of an intellectual one. More like an absence.

‘I brung them letters of reference you asked for, Mr Lennox,’ Twinkletoes said in a polite baritone that made the floor vibrate. He handed me two envelopes as he sat down and I half expected to hear the splintering of wood.

‘Thanks, Twinkle,’ I said, and read through them.

‘They okay, Mr Lennox?’ he asked earnestly, frowning as much as his lack of forehead would allow.

‘Twinkle, you know these are for me to show the bank?’

‘Yes, Mr Lennox.’

‘Well, the one from Willie Sneddon is fine, but the other one is no good.’

‘That’s from Mr Frazer, what used to be my manager when I was in the fight game, like. He says I was a good employee with a lot of heart, he says.’

‘I can see that, Twinkle. It’s a glowing reference and it would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s written it on paper that’s headed HM Prison Barlinnie.’

‘Mr Frazer’s had some bad luck,’ said Twinkletoes dolefully.

‘Yeah… I heard,’ I said, but didn’t mention that the three men he’d had beaten into comas had been a tad unluckier.

‘I think we’ll shelve this one, Twinkle. Like I said, Mr Sneddon’s should be fine.’ Willie Sneddon was still one of the Three Kings, but he’d worked a public relations miracle and become a reasonably respected figure in the world of legitimate Glasgow business, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms.

‘Now, you do understand that you’re there to make sure nobody robs the van, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes, Mr L. I app-ree-shee-ate that,’ he said with syllabic precision. Twinkletoes might not have been one of Nature’s great thinkers or scholars but he had to be commended on his efforts to improve his mind — and there was immense room for improvement. McBride devoted hours each day to reading. Sometimes as many as two pages in one day. The Reader’s Digest, Boy’s Own and The Hotspur were his favoured tomes from the literary canon. He had once confided in me that he sought to learn a new word every day.

‘This is a great pre-village for me. It being a straight job, and that. I hope them bank people know that I’ll not let any bastard put a finger on their money when I’m looking after it. Nobody’s gonna be better than me at spotting a robbery about to kick off… you know, with me knowing what it’s like from the other — ’

‘I think we should keep details of your relevant experience to ourselves,’ I said, cutting him off. He nodded gravely.

I had known Twinkletoes on and off for the last five years and, apart from one painful run-in for which he had apologized profusely, I had not been on the receiving end of his professional abilities. Especially those abilities that had earned him his nickname. ‘Twinkletoes’ derived from his means — his very effective means — of extracting either information or unpaid debts from the recalcitrant on behalf of Willie Sneddon. It was a method that involved bolt cutters and Twinkle’s recitation of This little Piggy…

‘And remember that your gaffer on this job is Archie McClelland,’ I said. ‘And Archie is ex-police. It would not be a good idea for you to share camp-fire stories.’ Twinkle attempted a frown again and I could see he was trying to work out where camp fires fitted into the job. ‘What I mean is don’t talk about the stuff you’ve done for Willie Sneddon. A copper is a copper. Ex or not.’

‘Got you, Mr L.’

I smiled, but somehow did not feel reassured. When Sneddon had switched to using a five-iron for its intended purpose on a golf course, rather than as a weapon, it had left Twinkletoes and Singer, his fellow thug, at something of a loose end. Sneddon kept them around and on the payroll, but more to keep them out of sight than anything, so I had had to clear it with Sneddon first before approaching Twinkletoes about the job. It would only be once a week, after all, and it would leave me free to pursue other work.

Employing a hardened thug with a criminal record as a security guard on a wages run may have been a risk, but anyone in Glasgow who ever sawed off the barrels of a shotgun or pulled a stocking over their heads would know who Twinkletoes was. And that he was connected to Willie Sneddon. My logic was that that would be enough to set toes itching before anyone thought about holding up my wages run.

At least, that was what I kept telling myself as I sent a happy and gainfully employed Twinkletoes McBride on his way.

I read through the information that Connelly and Lynch had given me on their missing comrade. Frank Lang had been a cook and union shop steward, working on cargo ships. He was a member of all the right associations and labour bodies. There wasn’t a lot of background in the information, but enough for me to feel the draught of a red flag being vigorously waved.

The supplied picture of Lang was some kind of official photograph taken for records. From the picture it looked to me like Lang was in his middle thirties, with a long narrow face and a round chin. Even in the black-and-white photograph it was clear that the hair was a very light blond and the eyes were a very pale shade of grey or blue. He wasn’t particularly handsome, or otherwise remarkable-looking, but there was something about his face that looked vaguely aristocratic. For no good reason, I found myself taking out the picture Pamela Ellis had given me of her errant husband and placed it next to Lang’s. They were, of course, totally different in appearance and just about every other way, but it just seemed strange to me that I was involved with two men who, each in his own way, was some kind of outsider. Ellis by dint of his foreign heritage and Lang because… because why? What was it about the picture of this thirty-seven-year-old union official that screamed out at me that he was a misfit. A square peg.

Maybe, I thought, it takes one to know one.

It was just after ten the following day when I parked outside a row of terraced houses in Drumchapel. It was a working-class district, all right, but this particular area was the domain of the new working class. These houses were less than two years old and were part of the Corporation’s initiative to replace the unsanitary conditions of the tenements with brand new, twentieth-century homes. As I stood there, the carbolic odour of The Future reaching through the damp late-autumn air, I wondered if Andrew Ellis’s company had blasted away the past to clear the site on which these new dwellings stood. There were four units to a block and Lang’s had a house on either side. There was no access to the back of the house that I could see without going around one of the ends, which would be less than inconspicuous. Added to which I had noticed the twitching of lace in the window next door and I spotted a woman walking her dog up the street, in my direction. A little impromptu burglary, which I had had in mind, was clearly not going to be an option.

Pausing to light a cigarette killed enough time to allow the woman walking the dog to pass me, but the ugly little pug paused himself to raise a hind leg and take a leak against the wheel arch of the Atlantic. I looked from the dog to his owner, who scowled back at me. She was a squat woman in her late forties with a headscarf-framed face to sink a thousand ships, wearing a coat of a material that could have served equally well for carpeting and whose legs were as thick at the ankles as at the knees.

Miss Scotland walked on, still scowling at the world, and I swung open the metal gate that still gleamed new, walked up the short path and rang the doorbell for appearances’ sake. Stranger things had happened than for a supposedly missing shop steward to answer his own front door. But, in this case, they didn’t. There was a small, fence-edged rectangle of well-kept grass to my right and I stepped onto it to peer through the window.

‘Can I help you?’

I turned to see a woman of about thirty standing at the neighbouring door, leaning against the jamb with her arms crossed. I worked out that she must have been the curtain-twitcher.

‘Oh… I didn’t see you there…’ I smiled at her disarmingly. She was worth smiling at. Dark blonde hair demi-waved and short, not too much make-up for town but too much for housework. Not knock-out but well constructed. She was wearing a pink woollen sweater that did a lot of good clinging and deep pink slacks.

‘Well, I saw you. What are you up to?’

‘I’m looking for Frank Lang,’ I said. ‘I’ve been sent by the union.’

‘You don’t look like a union type to me,’ she said, looking in the direction of the car, then back to me. Her expression was full of suspicion but not fear or unease. She could look after herself.

‘Can you tell me when you last saw Mr Lang?’ I asked. Still smiling.

‘You look more like a salesman,’ she said. ‘Are you a salesman?’

‘No, ma’am,’ I said. My cheeks were beginning to ache. ‘Like I said, I’ve been asked by the union to find Mr Lang. Urgent business. Could you tell me when you last saw him?’

‘What about those other men?’ she asked. ‘Weren’t they from the union?’

‘What other men?’

‘The ones he went away with. Weren’t they union people?’

I stopped smiling. ‘No, I don’t think they could have been. When did this happen?’

She looked me up and down then straightened up from her door jamb lean with a sigh. ‘You better come in, then…’

I sat in the small front room — they had front rooms in Drumchapel and not lounges, like they had in Bearsden — and took in my surroundings.

Everything was new: a patterned three-piece suite that still smelled of the showroom; the same geometric patterns on the linoleum floor reversed on the hearth rug; a sideboard against one wall; a matching kidney-shaped coffee table with a chunky red glass ashtray looking like a splash of lava on the teak veneer, a chrome sunburst wall clock above the mantelpiece. It was as if they had asked for the store window display to be shipped “as is” direct into their brand-new council home.

The thing that most caught my attention was the sixty-quid Bush television set that stood in one corner: one of the new jobs with the big seventeen-inch screens. I knew the price because I had been doing a bit of window shopping myself, playing with the idea that I could maybe get a new and bigger TV for Fiona and the girls for Christmas. I had built up a fair bit of cash over the last few years but had no one to spend it on other than myself. And except for my taste for expensive tailoring, my needs were pretty minimal. The only thing that had held me back from buying a set was my uncertainty about how it would go down with Fiona.

‘Nice place you have here,’ I said amiably when Lang’s neighbour came back from her kitchen, tea tray in hand.

‘Aye…’ she said, almost as if bored with the thought. ‘Better than our last place.’

‘Do you mind if I ask how much your TV cost you? I’m thinking about getting something similar.’

She shrugged. ‘Don’t know. It’s from RentaSet.’

‘I see,’ I said, and wondered how much of the Brave New World around me was on HP terms. ‘My name’s Lennox, by the way.’

‘Sylvia…’ she said. ‘Sylvia Dewar.’

‘You said Frank Lang went off with some men. When was this?’ I took the duck egg blue cup and saucer she handed me. Melamine, not china.

‘A week ago. No… nine days ago. Last Wednesday morning. About ten, ten-thirty.’ There was a change of wind and the cloud of suspicion drifted back over her expression. ‘What’s this all about? Like I said, you’re no union man.’

I laid a business card on the coffee table in front of her. ‘I’m an enquiry agent, Mrs Dewar. But I am working on the union’s behalf. Frank Lang has… well, he hasn’t exactly gone missing. Not yet, anyway, not officially… but the union have been trying to reach him and they are concerned about him.’

‘Oh… I see.’ She thought for a moment, pursing her lips. I noticed the lipstick was fresher than it had been when she went into the kitchen. ‘So you think these men he went with came and took him away against his will?’

‘I don’t know, Mrs Dewar — ’

‘Sylvia. You can call me Sylvia.’

‘I don’t know, Sylvia. You saw them. You saw Lang go with them. Did it look to you like he was unwilling to go?’

‘No. Not at all. He clearly knew them and they were chatting as they went to the car. And they certainly didn’t look like union men, either. They came in a big car. Expensive-looking.’

‘Do you know the make?’

She laughed. ‘I don’t know one car from the other. All I know is it wasn’t the type you usually see around here. And that it was dark red or brown.’

‘I see. Have there been any other odd comings and goings, recently?’

‘Not really. Frank Lang keeps himself to himself and is hardly ever at home. No wife, no family. The only time we know he’s there is when we smell his cooking.’

‘His cooking?’

‘I think he cooks fancy stuff. French, or something else foreign. That’s what it smells like, anyway. And he keeps all of these spices and things in his cupboards. Other than that I couldn’t say — my husband has more to do with him than me. He gets the impression that Frank spends most of his time attending meetings and talks, that kind of thing. Although I think he likes to dance.’

‘Dance?’

‘He went out every Saturday night. Always in a nice suit. A friend of mine said she saw him at the Palais. He was very good, she said.’

‘I see…’

‘Do you like to dance, Mr Lennox? I like to dance.’ The wistful expression gave way to bitterness. ‘Tom — that’s my husband — Tom doesn’t dance.’

‘Would it be worthwhile me coming back to talk to your husband? I mean if he had more to do with Mr Lang?’

Something frosted in her expression. ‘No… I don’t think that would do anyone any good. Tom does have more to do with Frank than I do, but not that much more. Anyway, there’s not much point talking to my husband about anything. He gets lots of stupid ideas in his head.’ Sylvia paused and eyed me. ‘Tom’s at work at the moment. He won’t be back until six tonight.’

‘The union told me that they had carried out a few enquiries of their own,’ I said, ignoring the invitation in ten-foot high neon. ‘Has anyone else been here to talk to you?’

‘No,’ she kept me held in her gaze. ‘Only you.’

I stood up. ‘Well, thanks for your time, Sylvia. If anything else occurs to you, please give me a ring. Obviously, I’d appreciate it if you got in touch right away if and when Mr Lang returns home next door. My number’s on the card.’

‘You haven’t finished your tea…’ she protested.

‘It was fine, thanks, but I have to go. Thanks for your help.’

‘You could stay for a while longer, couldn’t you?’

She got up from the sofa, stepped around the table and stood close to me. Too close. She couldn’t have signalled her meaning more clearly if she had been waving semaphore flags at me from two feet away.

‘Sorry…’ I smiled and put on my hat. ‘I’ve got to go.’

As I made my way back to the car, two thoughts struck me. The first struck me like a shovel across the back of the head: I had just declined a chance of guilt-free, no-complications sex. Something I would never have turned down before. But since Fiona had come on the scene, of course, it wouldn’t have been guilt-free.

The second thought was more of a nagger, like an eyelash in your eye: if Sylvia Dewar had nothing to do with Frank Lang, how come she knew what he kept in his cupboards.